Tag Archives: #lifelessons

So…this one isn’t really Scouty per say, although there is a lesson to be learned here.

Many years ago, well after I had left Scouting in my youth but before drinking the leader Kool-Aid, I was working at my job and among my many other duties I was the resident IT person. Not officially mind you, but if there was a computer issue that could be fixed by me at my slave wage rather than calling in a contractor, it became my job to get it fixed.

And so it came to pass that someone higher up on the food chain got themselves a brand spanking new computer. To give you an idea of the date range it meant they were upgrading from a pentium class to a PII (or possibly a Pentium III, I can’t remember at this point). Anyway, in a show of how magnanimous said higher up was, they gave me their old computer to retrofit for one of the peons. So I check around and find that the Receptionist / Secretary / poor girl who had to do most of the work for the Sales Director at the time was still running on a 486 machine. And this is a year that started in 2-0 peeps!

So I take her hard drive and slave it into this “new” (to her) computer. Not much else was worth saving. But on her old machine was this old old tape/disk drive…thing…that said Iomega on it. Not a ZIP drive which would have been the most prominent thing at the time from that company, but some internal thing that fit in a 5.25″ drive bay and hooked in like a HDD or optical drive. I ask her, “Do you need the tape drive?” Her response was, “Oh yes. We put our backups on that every week, I have to have that drive!” Crap.

And the search begins. I know the drive is made by Iomega but this old proprietary thing is so old that they don’t even acknowledge the fact that they made it. No support from them, nada. And with no drivers (because heaven forbid someone save installation disks in this place), I’m kind of screwed. This is definitely not plug ‘n play. Eventually my Google-fu wins out and I find buried in some long forgotten section of some long forgotten drivers website what I need. I am indeed the man!

Armed with my drivers, I get this monstrosity installed. Sucks so much power I think the lights dimmed (okay, not really). So I get all finished but want to test before I put the cover on the case, so I ask the nice secretary for one of her backup tapes. And she hands me…

(Wait for it…)

…a 3.5″ Floppy Disk! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! KHAAAAAAAAAAAN! *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* I could have burned through souls with the look of death in my eyes, and a tongue lashing on how much of my time was wasted over such a ID 10 T code error (put it together…ID10T) on their part would have been entirely wrranted. Instead I just replied with an, “Oh, well that’s actually called a floppy disk not a tape, and your floppy disk drive is working fine now,” and went about my life.

So what’s the tie in with Scouts here? Well, there are a couple. First, is that when something like that happens and you want to MDK someone over an issue like this, just remember that A Scout is Friendly…and Cheerful…and Kind…and Courteous…and Helpful…and probably going to be having a beer after work that night (assuming they are of legal age and not going to be at a Scouting function with youth present). Yelling at someone over what was on their part an honest mistake (we can’t assume everyone is a subject matter expert) doesn’t have any positive outcome other than the momentary good feeling for the person doing the yelling. In the long run it just hurts feelings and can sour a relationship, which is pretty universally a bad thing when you’re talking about a coworker, or fellow leader, or Scout…

The second tie in goes to a subject that is universally near the top of the problem list in every Scouting group I’ve seen, be it den, patrol, pack, troop, crew, district, council, whatever: communication. Had I spent a few extra minutes talking to my coworker and asking her for a “tape” or what specifically she uses it for, I would likely have discovered that she just didn’t have a good grasp on the terminology 9and let’s face it, 10 years ago the amount of folks in the workforce who weren’t computer literate was pretty high). So a little due dilligence on my part could have saved me 2 days of fruitless labor. Because I just jumped into the job without first clarifying exactly what the requirements were, I added a bunch of extra work that wasn’t necessary. So while in this instance the ID10T operator error was as much on me as it was the coworker because neither of us were communicating with each other effectively. And how many times have you seem a problem at the den, patrol, pack or troop level come up because of miscommunication? More often than we’d all like to admit I’m sure.

Is there a catch-all to fix that second issue? If you know of one, please share with the class!